Recording streams of data, such as digital television streams, can be a complicated task. Once recorded, manipulation of the recorded video stream also poses challenges. For example, it may be desirable to add metadata to a recorded video stream to describe an attribute of the video stream that is in effect over a range of time. To accomplish this by prior techniques, an instantaneous event would be inserted into a video stream at a location in the stream where the metadata commenced, i.e., a start position. To change the value of the attribute at a given point in time later in the stream, another instantaneous event would be inserted at a downstream location, which changed the value of the attribute or turned the attribute off. Another prior approach involved writing all metadata event information into each and every event in the data stream.
These techniques have several drawbacks. First, inserting the metadata into a recorded stream may require the entire stream to be altered, which is processor intensive and time consuming. Second, determining a current state of a recorded stream at an arbitrary point in the stream is difficult when represented by instantaneous events, because this requires searching backwards from the point of inquiry through the entire stream for all instantaneous events that set metadata or otherwise affect the state of the stream at the arbitrary point in the stream. This is also processor intensive and time consuming. Third, adding all metadata to each and every event in the data stream results in a undesirably large size. As a result, these prior techniques may result in slow access, and an undesirable user experience for users who record and manipulate data streams, such as digital television streams.